Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Melinda Elledge, who retired Thursday, June 30, 2011, was known for her meticulous research. "Mindy left no stones
unturned," said Anne Hunter, a victim/witness advocate for the county.

Elledge gets a hug from Joel Kohout, a retired BCA agent who has worked with her for 35 years, during Elledge's retirement party Monday at the Midland Hills Country Club in Roseville.

The last thing prosecutor Melinda Elledge wanted was to have the case of the murdered 3-year-old boy from White Bear Lake land on her desk.

For one thing, the Dennis Jurgens case was 22 years old. Some witnesses were dead or hard to find. Evidence about what his adoptive mother had done to him would be harder to get.

Then she saw the photos.

“It was horrific,” Elledge said last week. “I remember first seeing the pictures of his broken little body and just saying, ‘We’ll get her. We will get her.’ ”

Elledge, known as “Mindy” to her friends and colleagues, talked recently about the trial of Lois Jurgens and other prominent cases she handled in her 33 years as an assistant Ramsey County attorney. Elledge retired Thursday.

One prominent case was the trial of Tony DeJuan Jackson, a serial rapist who went on a crime spree across several counties. He was convicted in Ramsey County in 1998 and elsewhere for other crimes. Jackson is serving a life sentence in the state prison in Stillwater.

“He was always on the hunt,” Elledge said.

But Jackson came across as a gentleman. “He spoke the king’s English,” she said. “He dressed well. He is nobody that you would ever pick out as being anybody but a nice guy.”

The case Elledge prosecuted involved a woman whom Jackson attacked in her bedroom in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood.

Jackson would stalk his victims, Elledge said, learning their habits, when they left for work, when their husbands left.

Police and prosecutors recognized other common elements to the crimes. Jackson used duct tape to bind his victims. He wrapped the tape around the St. Paul woman’s head, covering her eyes so she couldn’t see him.

But she peered through cracks in the tape – enough to notice that he was wearing a fanny pack with the words “St. Paul” on it.

Police later stopped a man on the East Side who had duct tape in his car and a “St. Paul Companies” fanny pack with a gun inside.

Elledge consulted with a 3M engineer, who determined not only that the duct tape was made by 3M, but that the tears from one end of the tape in the St. Paul attack matched the tears on one end of another piece connected with Jackson.

THE VEILED ELLEDGE THREAT

That kind of meticulous research on a case is textbook Elledge, said Anne Hunter, a victim/witness advocate in the county attorney’s office who worked with Elledge on the Jurgens case and others.

“Mindy left no stones unturned,” Hunter said. “She just worked every inch of a case. I just think she’s one of the finest prosecutors that Ramsey County has had.”

Fellow Ramsey County prosecutor David Miller said that defense attorneys did not want to face Elledge in court.

“It was not always such a veiled threat: ‘You’d better take this plea offer, otherwise we’re gonna give the case to Mindy Elledge,’ ” Miller said.

Former prosecutor Jeanne Schleh met Elledge while they were classmates at William Mitchell College of Law and shared an interest in journalism. Elledge had worked as a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale News (now the Sun-Sentinel) in Florida.

“I thought the lawyers were jerks when I covered them,” she said.

Elledge had a boyfriend in Minnesota, but found no journalism jobs here.

“On a lark, I took the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) at the University of Miami, without studying for it.”

She passed, enrolled at William Mitchell and found that criminal law was a good fit.

Elledge and Schleh both joined the Ramsey County attorney’s office. Schleh worked with Elledge on the Jackson case and, to some extent, the Jurgens case.

Schleh and other colleagues said that Elledge’s experience with violent crimes, many of them sexual, prepared her well for another assignment: representing the county on commitments of mentally ill people, sexual psychopaths and “sexually dangerous” people.

“It was like a match made in heaven,” Schleh said. “The sexual psychopaths, they’re just her type of guys.”

Elledge became the go-to person among the office attorneys for advice on mental illness and the law.

So how many cases has Elledge handled?

The Ramsey County attorney’s system for tracking statistics on individual prosecutors goes back only to 1990, according to spokesman Paul Gustafson.

Since 1990, Elledge was the trial attorney assigned to 580 cases. But including her work as a charging attorney (who prepares and signs criminal complaints) and as an attorney who made an appearance at some phase of a case, the total number of cases in which she was involved was 1,316, Gustafson said.

BOY DEAD WITH 100 BRUISES

The Jurgens case is probably the one for which she is most remembered by the public.

It was April 1965 when Harold and Lois Jurgens called the family doctor to their home on Gardenette Drive in White Bear Lake. The doctor pronounced Dennis Jurgens dead at the scene. The boy was covered in bruises – 50 to 100 of them – and his body was emaciated.

Lois Jurgens said Dennis had fallen. Police investigated.

“They were eager officers,” Elledge said. “They were trying to do the right thing.”

Even then, an autopsy showed that Dennis died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bowel.

But Lois Jurgens’ brother was the assistant White Bear Lake police chief, and the officers were soon called off the investigation, Elledge said.

And things were different then.

“The whole concept of the battered-child syndrome that we know so well now – it had just hit the medical journals, one medical journal, in 1965,” she said.

When she got on the case in 1987, Elledge’s own son was 3. On the first day of trial, he was the same age, to the day, as the age Dennis was when he died.

One night, while watching Lois Jurgens on TV, her little boy said, “Mommy, that lady’s a bad witch.”

Multiple witnesses said they had observed Lois Jurgens abusing Dennis.

When he refused to eat his food, she force-fed him until he vomited. Then she made him eat his vomit. When he wet the bed, she put a clothes-pin on his penis. She hit him, slapped him, tied him to the toilet and grabbed him by the ears until they bled.

FROM A FEW FILES TO 10 BOXES

Elledge said she and her co-counsel, Clayton Robinson, worked 12 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week for seven months preparing for trial.

At first, records were scarce. The police file indicated that a number of people had been interviewed and that several provided written statements.

They were missing from the file.

Elledge, Robinson and Schleh had to dig for records, including Dennis’ adoption files. The painstaking research paid off.

“We started with 24 pages of police reports and a few old pictures, and we ended up with 10 file boxes,” Elledge said.

The case presented no end of challenges. The prosecutors knew from statements Harold Jurgens had made before trial that he would testify to having accidentally killed Dennis himself.

They also knew that he had told a different story during a 1965 hearing in juvenile court on the custody of Dennis’ older brother, Robert, who also was adopted. Robert ended up being removed from the Jurgens’ custody for four years.

His staff had just happened to be clearing out some old boxes and came across a file involving a Washington County family that took several of Jurgens’ adopted children into their home in the early 1970s. In that file was the transcript of the 1965 Ramsey County juvenile court hearing in which Dennis Jurgens’ death was discussed.

Harold Jurgens said then that he had been out of town the weekend Dennis died, but that Lois called him Saturday to say, “Dennis and I have been at it again.” Harold “knew what that meant,” so he immediately went home. Dennis died the next morning.

It was the document that the prosecutors had been desperately looking for, because it meant that Harold Jurgens could not say he had killed Dennis without perjuring himself.

“Clayton and I danced in the parking lot of Washington County” after getting the transcript, Elledge said, “because we could prove that Harold Jurgens was lying.”

He ended up asserting his right not to testify against his wife.

‘IN IT TO THE END’

The trial took place in Room 840, one of the two largest of the Ramsey County Courthouse in downtown St. Paul. It lasted more than three weeks. The gallery was packed.

“It was before they air-conditioned the courthouse and I remember it was really hot,” Elledge said.

Defense attorneys Doug Thomson and Deborah Ellis did not contest the abuse allegations, but said there was no proof Lois Jurgens was responsible for Dennis’ death. Then, after her conviction on third-degree murder, Lois Jurgens argued through her attorneys that she was mentally ill at the time.

The jury rejected that contention. Jurgens was sentenced to up to 25 years in prison. She was released after eight.

Harold Jurgens died in 2000. Lois Jurgens is believed to be living in her Stillwater home. Her phone number is unlisted.

Elledge never read the book written about the Jurgens case by Los Angeles Times reporter Barry Siegel, “A Death in White Bear Lake.”

She didn’t have to. “I lived it,” she said.

But she saw the TV movie based on the case. She thought it was poorly done and not true to life.

“We (prosecutors) were portrayed as dumber than dumb, and the White Bear Lake police all had Southern accents,” she said.

The actress who played Elledge “had this tiny little voice” and the co-counsel Robinson character “was always looking for gravy: ‘You got gravy with that?’ ”

Elledge also said Dennis Jurgens’ birth mother, who urged the White Bear Lake police to take another look at the case in 1986, unfairly painted the prosecutors as standing in the way of justice.

Jerry Sherwood pressured County Attorney Tom Foley to speed things up, to get to trial more quickly, Elledge said. Foley didn’t succumb to the pressure.

“She didn’t have to hound us to do anything,” Elledge said. “The minute we saw those pictures (of Dennis), we were in it till the end.”

DEDICATED, CARING

Besides her dedication to her work, Elledge is known in the office as a tremendously caring person, said fellow prosecutor Susan Hudson.

“She is always the first one to either personally give somebody whatever kind of card the occasion calls for, or organize a memorial…things like that,” Hudson said.

Despite the often grim and heartbreaking details of the job, Elledge said she has enjoyed it, particularly working with crime victims.

“It’s hard. It’s sad,” she said. “Just when you’ve heard what you think is the worst possible thing that one human being can do to another, something else comes along.

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